Chapter 11: San Francisco
I was the first one on the scene of the crime.
Ben was taking a little extra time shaving his chiseled visage in the event that we came across any more beautiful waitpersons on our trip while I trundled down the road back to our campsite perfectly happy in my cleansed state. I set my shower supplies on the picnic table and turned to the tent but before I could take another step a gasp of terror escaped my lips and my knees locked, frozen in place, horrified by what I saw.
There were yellow droplets, on the edge of the tent, trickling their way down to the earth. Thick, dark, yellow drops running like miscreants after a looting. I spun around. Who had done this? What awful person could have committed this crime. I thought first to the red-headed boy on the bicycle with the clipboard but it couldn’t have been him. I hadn’t seen him for a few hours. Then I eyed the campsites next to ours, where suddenly everyone had become and stranger and no one would return my gaze. Guilty eyes hiding from the rays of truth. Two sites down a family with children sat about eating food and plucking a guitar tunelessly. A little child looked at me and then looked away.
O, but who could I blame? I turned back to the tent and fell to my knees. Who could I blame but myself? I had been the one to suggest withholding the rain fly until it dried. Until it dried! O, the agony, the utter defeat, the painful irony of it all! Woe! O, Woe!
“What’s the matter?” Ben had returned from his shower.
“Look what they’ve done!” I cried, voice tense, eyes brimming with droplets of my own.
Ben followed my gaze and started — choking back an angry yell. Then he walked violently over to the picnic table, retrieved his water bottle, came back to the tent, and squirted freshly distilled water along the edge, washing the yellow drops of sin into the earth from whence it came.
“Get the rain tarp,” he said. “We shall never speak of this again.”
DAMON: July 12th, once again I ate so much breakfast food I want to vomit. I’m sitting hunched over on the floor rocking back and forth like a young child with a stomachache. Ben left to wash dishes, I was left to make sandwiches. Each scoop of peanut butter and jelly brought me closer and closer to emptying my stomach. The smell of food disgusts me. Anyhow: a little boy — well, not really little, but a boy — with bright red long hair on an old Schwinn bike rode by with a green folder. This is the fourth time I have seen him in Fort Bragg at four different locations on the same bike with the same green folder and the same clothes. Now he is here at about 8:15 in the morning. He did a loop around the parking lot, came back and passed as I sat there trying not to vomit and, at the same time, making sandwiches and I thought to myself: “I need to make a note of this boy. Something is up.” Then, he swung around an came back and he spoke unto me, and the boy said (something to the effect of):
“Well, I see they got a pool here; I suspect they might have showers.”
I wasn’t really sure if it was a question or not but I said, yea. And then he asked if they had showers and I said yes and then he said:
“About thirty dollars a week to use the pool?”
I stared at him blankly. And he said:
“Ah, you just here for the day.”
And I nodded. And he said, oh, okay, and then I suggested perhaps he talk to someone in the office. And he said:
“Yea,” and then he left.”
This is a weird town.
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